Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Sunday December 09, 2007 @11:29AM
from the this-can't-be-real dept.

conner_bw writes "This week's film blogs have been left aghast as Mike Judge's grotesque fictional energy drink Brawndo from the movie Idiocracy became a reality. To recap: Fox wouldn't support a film about Brawndo, the energy drink that destroys plants, debases the human race, and makes those who drink it 'win at yelling' but they are now putting wholehearted support behind the actual drink?" And if you haven't seen Idiocracy, you are missing out. It is the smartest stupid movie I've seen. Whoever did production design on that thing deserves an Oscar.

I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into watching Idiocracy. I thought it would be another bland, generic comedy full of juvenile humor and low jabs at the government.

Now I tell everyone that they must go and see it. Mike Judge is a genius when it comes to social commentary (see also: Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, King of the Hill). He has really corrected (distorted?) my view of our sinking-ship society.

I thought the same thing at first, though I did watch the movie voluntarily. It managed to be funny and interesting, and I'd probably watch it again. (That's probably the best thing I could say about a movie... I'd watch it again. With so many movies, there's rarely a reason to watch the same one over again.)

I don't think I'd call it genius, but compared to most 'comedies', it's definitely a cut above.

"Idiocracy" is a personality/intelligence test. People have one of these reactions:1. Think the movie was hilarious. Did not get the message. The first group does not understand the movie is about them, the truly stupid people.2. Think the movie was hilarious because they got the message. The second group is wannabe evil overlords.3. Did not understand the movie and found only occasional humor. The third group is normal. They need a higher class of humor but did not understand the message. Please explain the message to these people.4. Understood the movie. Found some humor, but mostly sad. This group includes all of my friends.

My parents had two children. The welfare family across the street had eight children. Almost no adults I respect have more than two children. Having two children only retains most of your genes for one generation. If you respect yourself and your spouse, you must have at least three children.

I rushed to see it because I love Judge's other work and really enjoyed the premise of it.

I was sorely disappointed with the movie however. For me the laugh potential of a fat redneck say "he talks faggy" is one, sadly the line was repeated roughly every ten minutes. The social commentary is fine, we can all see the Costco with a thousand aisles, but from all the hype it got from people I know about being hilarious I just didn't see it.

Completely offtopic but this seems a good place to ask: is there a way to do something like that in Safari? Safari has converted me over with the dictionary support and the find functionality, but I dearly miss my imdb, urban dictionary, and dictionary.com keyword searches.

The lead character's room mate, "Sol," was played by Edward G. Robinson. The author of the book on which the movie was based, Harry Harrison, was on set during the filming. (Among other things, he suggested that a character visiting a butcher bring her own plastic bag with her.) Robinson, best known for his tough-guy gangster roles, asked Harrison what the hell his character was about. Harrison told him, (paraphrasing) "You're me, as a dying old man. You remember the world before everything went to shit."

One of the things Sol rants about to Charton Heston? The greenhouse effect.

Also, the big ugly secret of the movie -- Soylent Green is People -- is just a sympton. Soylent Green is supposed to be made of krill and plankton. Heston's character finds a secret research study commissioned by the Soylent Corporation revealing that humanity has managed to kill off the ocean ecosystem [royalsociety.org].

That movie was an interesting look on today's society. The evolution of Fuddruckers was hilarious. Mike Judge's future was really thought out, let's hope aliens that happen by at that time just wipe us out and put us out of our misery.

I loved it everytime someone said "It's got electrolytes!" I ran cross-country and track in high school, and my coach always reminded us to drink plenty of gatorade after practice to restore electrolytes. This was many years before the movie too...

He is right about needing to replenish electrolytes after activity like that. Among other things, severely low electrolyte levels can cause you to die because the electrical impulses that make your organs work can't be transmitted. It's the reason people can die in those stupid water drinking contests that some places love to do as promotional gimmicks.I actually carry electrolyte tabs in the med kit I pack with me for training and hiking. It's not generally a life-threatening issue unless you let it get

Growing up in a small rural area, I knew people just like Clevon. And they were regarded as the alpha males because they were good at sports. Some got a free ride to state college for their physical skills. Unfortunately they didn't complete the first year of college because they treated it like high school...

The "he talks faggy" bit gave me a chuckle. I actually had to learn how to talk to people in my rural home town and not use language that confused them. The scary part is that I used to do it unconsciously. I'd go to college and communicate normally, then come home and "adjust" for the locals. First time I noticed what I was doing it gave me the serious creeps.

And I can still do it if I wish, and I haven't lived there in a dozen years. One minute I can be talking about Heisenberg, the next moment I c

Intelligence is our defining trait. It's the reason we matter. There's no shortage of animals who are stronger, faster, more vicious, or faster breeders. Sure, lots of random sports fucks spent just as much time as I did getting better, the difference is while it's unlikely I'll contribute anything to our civilization, they never can because what they do is utterly useless. If we could somehow exchange a hundred Barry Bonds for one more Stephen Hawking, we'd be crazy not to.

While I agree the movie was pretty damn funny, I don't think the future as depicted in the movie was "really thought out". It had just one premise: everyone's dumber than your shoe. There was nothing else to it.

One thing I'd like to point out about the intro is that it's just that: an intro to a movie. Nothing more. As a Trevor type who descended from a Clevon type, I find it sad that so many people are so ignorant of genetics/sociology (and full of themselves, like Wonder Gamete here [slashdot.org]) to believe that the 'idiots' are going to overpopulate and subsequently take over the world unless the 'smart' people do something about it. Lamarckian evolution was proved false long ago; just because a group of people isn't educated and therefore doesn't make use of their intelligence does not mean that their children will be stupid. They're just more likely to go uneducated and continue the cycle. What I'm saying is, it's nothing a little education couldn't cure, and even if nothing is done about it, intelligent people will never die out, they'll just rise up from 'unintelligent' sources./soapbox.

I have to both agree and disagree. While education is certainly the largest facet of an individual's "intelligence," it isn't everything. It is not unreasonable to assume that at least part of an individual's intellectual potential is inherited.

We have all known people who were given every opportunity, every advantage in life, and still ended up stupid as a post. Hell, we breed dogs for various traits--personality and intelligence being two of them--why should we assume that we're immune to the same thing?

Because people's brains are much more plastic (adaptable) than dogs'. People are born in a more underdeveloped state (eg. puppies walk within a short time of being born - babies take months) and our brains' development are much more environmentally influenced.

Anyway, yes, some people are inherently smarter than others. It doesn't mean that their entire germ line is also smarter - there are many cases of smart parents having a stupid child - even one given every advantage.

I had the same reaction originally. But then, just imagine for a moment that the genetic origin of stupidity is substituted for a social/cultural origin. A society/culture that consistently rewards dumb actions while frowns uppon smart ones. The movie's point is still valid, isn't it? In that sense, the genetics part is just a vehicle for the movie to present a "how we got there" in a funny way.

Lamarckian evolution was proved false long ago; just because a group of people isn't educated and therefore doesn't make use of their intelligence does not mean that their children will be stupid.

Individuals differ in intelligence. Intelligence is (partly) heritable. These points follow logically from a basic understanding of Darwinian evolution (not to mention being supported by reams of empirical evidence). Read this [gnxp.com], to start (the focus here is on population differences, but heritable individual differences in IQ are even more strongly supported).

It can be shown that native intelligence is heritable to some degree. There's even racial differences in average IQ - with east Asians being the smartest (oh that ought to get me a lot of flack).

But more importantly, is the idea that intelligence is self-selecting. When the stupid choose to have sex with the stupid, they'll also do stupid things during pregnancy (drink Brawndo, for instance), treat their children stupidly (i.e. without enough the proper stimuli) and the combination of genetic inferiority, developmental inferiority, and a society that glamourizes both will create a society that will ruin itself faster than lead pipes ruined Rome.

What I find amazing is that people today choose to be stupid, even as adults who are have a reasonably high IQ. There's huge social pressure to act stupidly.

I could say that humanity is on the cusp of a drastic change, but we've been in a period of drastic change for a while so that sounds a bit stale. But if we can manage to survive the great social upheaval that will accompany a change in energy sources, we will modify the DNA of every living thing. This, coupled with eventual space colonization, is one possible outcome, Idiocracy is another. I don't know which will happen, but things will NOT be as they are now in a century.

I believe I have a reasonably strong understanding of genetics, and I'd like to disagree with your premise. Yes, there is definitely an education component involved, and it's important to acknowledge that, however, intelligence is highly genetic. That doesn't mean you have to have smart parents to be smart, but it does mean that your level of intelligence is highly affected by what genetic ingredients you have in you. Remember 9th grade biology when you studied Mendel's pea plants? It's very possible from two tall plants (dominant) to product a short one. (recessive.) However, both tall plants must posses the recessive short gene. I think the point of the demonstration in the movie is that over long periods of time, that Trevor gene could eventually become less and less prominent, perhaps one day disappearing completely.

Now, I'm not necessarily advocating that we start sterilizing the stupid or anything, but it's incorrect to say that anyone, with the proper education, can become a Trevor. Personally, I believe that we are on a track towards a divergence in our evolution. (if we don't kill ourselves first) I'm talking hundreds or thousands of generations in the future, not anytime soon.

Lamarckian evolution was proved false long ago; just because a group of people isn't educated and therefore doesn't make use of their intelligence does not mean that their children will be stupid. They're just more likely to go uneducated and continue the cycle. What I'm saying is, it's nothing a little education couldn't cure, and even if nothing is done about it, intelligent people will never die out, they'll just rise up from 'unintelligent' sources.

I mean, talk about missing the point Fox. I mean, seriously, the movie is about rampant commercialism destroying society because people are gradually becoming too stupid to resist more insistent and clever marketing tactics, and now they're rolling out Brawndo?

I mean, WTF, I hope no one that saw Idiocracy goes and buys this, because it's contributing money to the very thing the movie was preaching against. Now we've only got to wait until the U.S. government endures a financial crisis (whoops) and then Fox can attempt to buoy the FCC and FDA and buy them out, and we're looking at the degradation of the world. Of society.

I always wondered if the other countries in the world had devolved as much as America had in the movie, maybe it's time to consider a change of scenery.

Sort of like all of The Matrix paraphernalia? It is like bits of wisdom can escape from a sea of shit, but only for a short time before it is again swallowed by the umber oppressor. I guess it prevents truly insightful films from gaining enough of a foothold in society to exist outside of more than just a single generation's enjoyment.

Ahhh, but therein lies the problem, lack of proper education, and yet we keep paying teachers more, even though all they do is teach obedience in schools, and listening to authority, but they don't teach proper survival skills, neither in the wild nor in the concrete jungles that we call "modern society."

That leads me to believe that perhaps the problem isn't having watchdogs to "protect us from rampant commercialism" but perhaps we should have the ability to judge for ourselves what we NEED and what we WANT and how best to achieve it... but that would involve freedom, liberty and less control by others over our lives.

If you think that any teachers work from 7am until 11pm more than once in their entire career you must be deranged.

I was married to a HS teacher for 17 yrs. Most teachers DO work 12 hr days. In the week or 2 leading up to midterms/exams, they turn int 16+ hr days. The last 2 weeks of school it was 20 hr days.

I hate the bitch for cheating on me and breaking up our marriage, but credit where credit is due - Most teachers are hard working, dedicated people. You have to LOVE the job to put up with the BS. I saw many people come, work a semester, then tell the administration they would not be returning for the next semester. They also spend a significant amount of their breaks readying for the next term or year.

You are the one deranged. They don't print enough money to get me to work as hard and put up with as much crap as they do.

And not a computer scientist? Nobody's forcing him to stay in that job. If he was good enough to teach, he could have gone and also done the "computer scientist" job, but he / she didn't. Why not? Its called RISK AVERSION... otherwise known as fear of uncertainty. Having to provide goods rather than just preach a doctrine is different.

Right, and by paying teachers not even close to the same sort of salary a competent individual in the field can make, we ensure that the only people who go into teaching are the risk averse and the least competent. The reality is that teachers do have to provide the goods, where the goods are educated students who have developed a good grasp of the material. You can argue (as you do in the rest of your post) that teachers don't do this, and I might well agree with you. But then if you're in the market and the people you hire consistently fail to deliver the goods, what do you do? Ideally you start hiring better people who, though they might cost more, can actually deliver. By saying "teachers do a poor job, so we shouldn't pay them much" you just ensure that the only people who will go into teaching are exactly the risk averse people who are poor teachers -- the position holds limited appeal for anyone else. I'm sorry you didn't have any good teachers. Your experience, does not, however, mean that good teachers don't exist. It simply means that no-one capable of being a good teacher was willing to accept the pay and work conditions of teaching in the sort of high schools you went to...

Wait... are you actually suggesting that teachers are over-paid? In most places that I've been or even heard about, teachers barely make a livable wage. If anything, it's a problem that it's hard to attract and keep good teachers because they're paid poorly and mistreated by principals (and other school bureaucrats) and parents (who refuse to believe that their little darling has ever been anything but perfect). And part of the reason kids never get a chance to learn anything but "obedience" is because class sizes are way too big (sometimes as much as 35 kids to a teacher). The teacher doesn't have time to do anything except try to keep the classroom under control.

If we paid teachers decently, if parents got involved in their kids educations, and if we had 15-20 kids per class, you'd see a huge difference in our education system from that alone.

perhaps we should have the ability to judge for ourselves what we NEED and what we WANT and how best to achieve it

In case you don't understand, the problem some people have with "commercialism" (consumerism) is the fact that it's inherently filled with grand efforts to prevent people from using their own judgment. We're constantly being inundated with attempts to brainwash us. I know, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but read up sometime on advertising/marketing/PR theory, and you'll see that it's pretty scary stuff. They all aim at making false unconscious connections between positive feelings and the product/person/company that they're trying to sell. Advertisers have even spent a lot of time studying cults and fascist regimes in order to mimic their methods.

Really, it's even public knowledge, if you care to study it. So in order to educate people properly and allow them to exercise good judgment, we may have to take some steps to reduce the influence of these brainwashing techniques.

Regarding the PR system, I've studied it.I've also begun applying the Jeff Cooper awareness system to it. If you spend life in condition YELLOW (not harmful and not really stressful, but merely active awareness of your surroundings) you begin to spot this kind of stuff, and even get to find it funny. I travel with friends whom I'm teaching that system of awareness to, and I'm noticing the change as they begin to apply it. All of a sudden they're harder to trick and to fool into things, harder to bait, wh

I mean, WTF, I hope no one that saw Idiocracy goes and buys this, because it's contributing money to the very thing the movie was preaching against. Now we've only got to wait until the U.S. government endures a financial crisis (whoops) and then Fox can attempt to buoy the FCC and FDA and buy them out, and we're looking at the degradation of the world. Of society.

If you honestly think that will happen you are really deranged. Im not entirely sure about the FCC but the FDA is full of people Im sure would r

I mean, talk about missing the point Fox. I mean, seriously, the movie is about rampant commercialism destroying society because people are gradually becoming too stupid to resist more insistent and clever marketing tactics, and now they're rolling out Brawndo?

I had the same reaction years ago when The Running Man had been popular, and some TV executive saw this post-apocalyptic movie about jingoistic, themed-warrior reality TV combat and thought "gosh, that IS a great idea!". American Gladiators was on for what, 5 or 6 years? At least they didn't actually kill the contestants.

I mean, talk about missing the point Fox. I mean, seriously, the movie is about rampant commercialism destroying society because people are gradually becoming too stupid to resist more insistent and clever marketing tactics, and now they're rolling out Brawndo?

What makes you think that they actually missed the point?

This is Fox, we're talking about -- not exactly the banner for corporate America respecting the intelligence of their customers. (e.g. "When Animals Attack," "The O'Reilly Factor," "Who Wants t

Now we've only got to wait until the U.S. government endures a financial crisis (whoops) and then Fox can attempt to buoy the FCC and FDA and buy them out

There is a basic, fundamental difference between government and business. The US Government isn't a corporation where you could buy all its devalued stock and then "own" it. The only thing NewsCorp could conceivably do would be to bribe elected officials through campaign contributions to get favorable treatment. Sadly, it's morons like you that illustrate exactly how close we actually are to an Idiocracy.

It's time to take your tin foil hats off folks. This is product is made by Redux Beverages, aka the maker of the energy drink Cocaine. This isn't the first time the company has tried to push a product with a famous name. It's the same strategy the company used with Cocaine. Go back to bed folks, there's nothing new here to see.Company's websitehttp://www.drinkredux.com/ [drinkredux.com]

I think what happened here is what happens to a lot of cult movies these days. Producers (Fox) expected it to tank, so did not spend money promoting it. Instead of tanking, it garnered a big cult following. Fox now wants to cash in on that big cult profit center by promoting the DVD. Hence, Brawndo as a tie-in to the movie, basically a promotion for the DVD since it's now too late to promote it at the box office. And this exactly is the sort of movie that makes more money on DVD even in the best case scenario.

Still, I can't help thinking that all of the Fox channels and Fox News in particular would be well-served by the world as depicted in Idiocracy, a world which the fictional Brawndo helped build. Maybe they think it'll happen in reality, too.

Hit up YouTube and look for a TV show called "Maximum Exposure", or "Max-X". It's as close to "Ow! My Balls!" as I've ever seen. It's basically America's Funniest Home Videos combined with fire/flood/disaster/riot/sporting event footage, and a commentator from Idiocracy. "Now watch this dude. He's walking along the seawall with his buddies, and he doesn't see the wave behind him. But heyy-- the wave sees him! Boom! And he's sucked out to

From what I read, San Francisco-based Omni Consumer Products, which licenses fake products in films to make and sell, is a real company. Redux, the manufacturers, were approached to market this thing. Corporate PDF blurb located here:

Does anybody else out there remember the music video with Rob Malda and 5 or 6 other guys playing guitar accompaniment to something -- I forget what it was...perhaps Richard Stallman's classic tune "Come on people, Share the software"?

Well, that's the first thing that came to my mind in the Rehabilitation Night scenes that showed the Guitar Army.

On a different note, who did the voice of the monster-truck arena announcer? I swear it's the voice of Strongbad, but I can't find any credit.

If one may recall they did a similar thig for the simpson's movie with "duff beer" and a few other drinks. The stuff sold out in days. Even after the movie left the theater people were still reselling it at a markup. I don't think brawny will have quite that much success, but I suspect it will still make money, and that is the point after all. Besides, as proved by the fact that you are even reading this, it does work very well as a marketing tool.

I've seen Idiocracy 2 or 3 times and I think it's okay, but it's not some great social mirror. I have a nagging feeling that Darwinism doesn't want humanity to be intelligent, it just wants us to survive.
Also since the movie assumes that we are getting less intelligent, past generations must have been MORE intelligent that what we are today. I don't believe that (though we'll never really know).

It looks like an hoax to me.
First, is it too ironic to be moronic
Second, I have already seen spoof ads like that on youtube that seems to be made by the same guy.
Third, the video is hosted on youtube
Fourth, the website works fine on Firefox in Linux. That's not something Fox would actually be able to do.

Maybe I wasn't being specific enough, or the mods are unfamiliar with the movie. The 'quotable' portions of the movie are composed of incredibly stupid statements (for instance, the "it's got what plants crave" quote FTS). The people who quote this part of the movie are, in effect, committing one of many atrocities that the movie rails against--repeating something they heard, just because it sounds funny.

The rest of my post, e.g. "the only redeeming quality" remark, was a statement of opinion (IMHO: in my

Idiocracy is even more trenchant, more damning, more -- hell, I'll say it -- revolutionary than Office Space. Bad enough that Judge captured the slacker ethos of an entire generation in his 1999 film, stoked the discontent and general don't-wanna-be-a-cog-in-the-wheel-edness of legions of miserable corporate drones... but that was containable damage. Just let geeks like Ron Livingstone's Peter stuff their faces with gourmet food and come to work in their pajamas, and presto: happy drones.

But with Idiocracy, Judge -- who wrote and directed -- takes a surgical scalpel to a far more fundamental aspect of modern American society: our propensity, nay, glad willingness to dumb everything way the hell down until there's nothing but dumb left... and then to celebrate the dumb.

Mike Judge, a man born in Ecuador, raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, who lived formative years in Dallas, Texas and who is now raising a family in Austin, Texas, he is no slouch. He is a master of the craft. He is a master of media and story telling. He brought us Office space, yes. He brought us The Milton Series, yes. He also brought us Bevis & Butthead and King of The Hill. All equally poignant polar opposites that come together in Idiocracy.

Less we forget that, if Mr. Judge wanted to, this guy could move to New York and be as cosmopolitan as the next asshole. This guy lives and breathes a contemporary paradox. This movie is fart jokes and cheap laughs wrapped in sardonicism and absurdity with a glossy hollywood delivery. Office Space is "headier" but isn't it possible that a movie about stupidity which, on the surface, appears to be only full of "simple gags" ironic and worthy of further scrutiny? I mean, does anyone (Mike Judge, David Herman, Fox Marketing) get paid for saying "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. [carlsjr.com]" or is that satire? Or is it both?

Every self-felating braniac that praises this film as an assault on the culture behind "Jackass" would be well-served to know that Mr Judge himself made a cameo appearance in "Jackass II", was on MTV and FOX payroll (a.k.a. the root of all culture rot?), and Dax Shepard as Frito Pendejo/Joe's lawyer in this movie was a staple of the first season of Ashton Kutcher Punk'd. When the latino trumpets blare as president Camacho rides his motorcycle in a parade celebrating the average man, the horns blare sincere. This is not a film about evolution, or eugenics, but a blazing critique on political, scientific, and artistic ineptitude for the slacker in all of us.

slacker, noun informal: an influential American independent film directed by Richard Linklater that was shot on location in Austin, Texas in 1991. Texas is the reason.

All in the family

* David Herman as Secretary of State - notable for his role as Michael Bolton in the 1999 comedy, Office Space.* Stephen Root as Judge Hank "The Hangman" BMW - the voice of Bill Dauterive and Buck Strickland on King of the Hill. Also, Milton in Office Space.* Andrew Wilson as Beef Supreme - is the oldest brother of actors Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson.

There are so many asinine holes in the logic regarding the near sub-human intelligence that it just plain isn't interesting. Who the hell fixes the cars? How do they DRIVE the cars? They have enough trouble with menial tasks that it makes no sense that the society in the movie actually survives.

That, and the inane love story reminds me of Adam Sandler movies.

I'm with you. The movie is worthless as commentary. Give me A Clockwork Orange